Dr Paula Nerlich is an experimental designer, researcher, educator, and facilitator whose practice explores how we can work with living systems as collaborators rather than simply as materials. As a biodesigner, she engages with sensory materials and living systems to investigate how biological processes can shape the ways we design, make, and experience the world. Working across biomaterials, sensory experience, and more-than-human design, she brings together creative practice, scientific research, and hands-on experimentation.

Originally trained in textile design, Paula's practice has evolved to focus on living, responsive, and time-based materials, including bacterial cellulose, mycelium, and food-surplus biomaterials. She is interested in biological processes as dynamic systems that shape materials and artefacts over time, inviting new ways of thinking about care, ecology, and our relationships with the living world.

Paula completed her PhD at the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment, where she explored living textiles and human–microbial relationships. She is an Academic and Artistic Associate at the Circular School, HfG Karlsruhe, and an Associate Lecturer at the MA Biodesign, Central Saint Martins. Across her teaching and facilitation, she creates environments where making, experimentation, observation, and critical reflection become methods for exploring materials, processes, and emerging ideas.

Her practice spans research, exhibitions, public engagement, and collaborations with scientists, designers, artists, and cultural organisations. Whether working in the studio, laboratory, or exhibition context, Paula develops participatory experiences that encourage close engagement with sensory, living, and responsive materials, fostering curiosity, material inquiry, and new perspectives on designing with living systems.